The Constant Princess Read online

  I go into my room and I order them to close the shutters and bolt the doors. But it is too late. They have already brought me the worst news of my life; closing the door will not keep it out. I cannot bear the light. I cannot bear the sound of ordinary life going on. I hear a page boy laugh in the garden near my window and I cannot understand how there can be any joy or gladness left in the world, now that my baby has gone.

  And now the courage I have held on to, for all my life, turns out to be a thread, a spiderweb, a nothing. My bright confidence that I am walking in the way of God and that He will protect me is nothing more than an illusion, a child’s fairy story. In the shadows of my room I plunge deep into the darkness that my mother knew when she lost her son, that Juana could not escape when she lost her husband, that was the curse of my grandmother, that runs through the women of my family like a dark vein. I am no different after all. I am not a woman who can survive love and loss, as I had thought. It has only been that, so far, I had never lost someone who was worth more than life itself to me. When Arthur died my heart was broken. But now that my baby is dead, I want nothing but that my heart should cease to beat.

  I cannot think of any reason I should live and that innocent sinless babe be taken from me. I can see no reason for it. I cannot understand a God who can take him from me. I cannot understand a world that can be so cruel. In the moment that they told me, “Your Grace, be brave, we have bad news of the prince,” I lost my faith in God. I lost my desire to live. I lost even my ambition to rule England and keep my country safe.

  He had blue eyes and the smallest, most perfect hands. He had fingernails like little shells. His little feet…his little feet…

  Lady Margaret Pole, who had been in charge of the dead child’s nursery, came into the room without knocking, without invitation, and kneeled before Queen Katherine, who sat on her chair by the fire, among her ladies, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.

  “I have come to beg your pardon, though I did nothing wrong,” she said steadily.

  Katherine raised her head from her hand. “What?”

  “Your baby died in my care. I have come to beg your pardon. I was not remiss, I swear it. But he is dead. Princess, I am sorry.”

  “You are always here,” Katherine said with quiet dislike. “In my darkest moments, you are always at my side, like bad luck.”

  The older woman flinched. “Indeed, but it is not my wish.”

  “And don’t call me ‘Princess.’ ”

  “I forgot.”

  For the first time in weeks Katherine sat up and looked into the face of another person, saw her eyes, saw the new lines around her mouth, realized that the loss of her baby was not her grief alone. “Oh God, Margaret,” she said, and pitched forwards.

  Margaret Pole caught her and held her. “Oh God, Katherine,” she said into the queen’s hair.

  “How could we lose him?”

  “God’s will. God’s will. We have to believe it. We have to bow beneath it.”

  “But why?”

  “Princess, no one knows why one is taken and another spared. D’you remember?”

  She felt from the shudder that the woman remembered the loss of her husband in this, the loss of her son.

  “I never forget. Every day. But why?”

  “It is God’s will,” Lady Margaret repeated.

  “I don’t think I can bear it.” Katherine breathed so softly that none of her ladies could hear. She raised her tearstained face from her friend’s shoulder. “To lose Arthur felt like torture, but to lose my baby is like death itself. I don’t think I can bear it, Margaret.”

  The older woman’s smile was infinitely patient. “Oh, Katherine. You will learn to bear it. There is nothing that anyone can do but bear it. You can rage or you can weep, but in the end, you will learn to bear it.”

  Slowly Katherine sat back on her chair; Margaret remained, with easy grace, kneeling on the floor at her feet, handclasped with her friend.

  “You will have to teach me courage all over again,” Katherine whispered.

  The older woman shook her head. “You only have to learn it once,” she said. “You know, you learned at Ludlow: you are not a woman to be destroyed by sorrow. You will grieve but you will live, you will come out into the world again. You will love. You will conceive another child, this child will live, you will learn again to be happy.”

  “I cannot see it,” Katherine said desolately.

  “It will come.”

  The battle that Katherine had waited for, for so long, came while she was still overshadowed with grief for her baby. But nothing could penetrate her sadness.

  “Great news, the best news in the world!” wrote her father. Wearily, Katherine translated from the code and then from Spanish to English. “I am to lead a crusade against the Moors in Africa. Their existence is a danger to Christendom, their raids terrify the whole of the Mediterranean and endanger shipping from Greece to the Atlantic. Send me the best of your knights—you who claim to be the new Camelot. Send me your most courageous leaders at the head of your most powerful men and I shall take them to Africa and we will destroy the infidel kingdoms as holy Christian kings.”

  Wearily, Katherine took the translated letter to Henry. He was coming off the tennis court, a napkin twisted around his neck, his face flushed. He beamed when he saw her, then at once his look of joy was wiped from his face by a grimace of guilt, like a boy caught out in a forbidden pleasure. At that fleeting expression, at that brief, betraying moment, she knew he had forgotten that their son was dead. He was playing tennis with his friends, he had won, he saw the wife he still loved, he was happy. Joy came as easily to the men of his family as sorrow to the women of hers. She felt a wave of hatred wash over her, so powerful that she could almost taste it in her mouth. He could forget, even for a moment, that their little boy had died. She thought that she would never forget, never.

  “I have a letter from my father,” she said, trying to put some interest into her harsh voice.

  “Oh?” He was all concern. He came towards her and took her arm. She gritted her teeth so that she did not scream, “Don’t touch me!”

  “Did he tell you to have courage? Did he write comforting words?”

  The clumsiness of the young man was unbearable. She summoned her most tolerant smile. “No. It is not a personal letter. You know he rarely writes to me in that way. It is a letter about a crusade. He invites our noblemen and lords to raise regiments and go with him against the Moors.”

  “Does he? Oh, does he? What a chance!”

  “Not for you,” she said, quelling any idea Henry might have that he could go to war when they had no son. “It is just a little expedition. But my father would welcome Englishmen, and I think they should go.”

  “I should think he would.” Henry turned and shouted for his friends, who were hanging back like guilty schoolboys caught having fun. They could not bear to see Katherine since she had become so pale and quiet. They liked her when she was the queen of the joust and Henry was Sir Loyal Heart. She made them uncomfortable when she came to dinner like a ghost, ate nothing, and left early.

  “Hey! Anyone want to go to war against the Moors?”

  A chorus of excited yells answered his holloa. Katherine thought that they were like nothing so much as a litter of excited puppies, Lord Thomas Darcy and Edward Howard at their head.

  “I will go!”

  “And I will go!”

  “Show them how Englishmen fight!” Henry urged them. “I, myself, will pay the costs of the expedition.”

  “I will write to my father that you have eager volunteers,” Katherine said quietly. “I will go and write to him now.” She turned away and walked quickly towards the doorway to the little stair that led to her rooms. She did not think she could bear to be with them for another moment. These were the men who would have taught her son to ride. These were the men who would have been his statesmen, his Privy Council. They would have sponsored him at his first Communion, they woul